First off, I am super excited to see this game being made. The work already done on it (that I can see from the kickstarter video) gives me a lot of hope for the project.

The thing in DK that I had always wanted was a way to attack the surface world, like villages and stuff. The heroes always seemed to hear tales of your evil, but all you ever saw was your dungeon underground. You were always the one being attacked and not the attacker. I was just wondering, will this be addressed in the game?

And we are looking to have ways to incorporate the Overworld (probably indirectly) which gives the reason for the Empire to want to come down into the depths and attack you. One feature is hero castles which we'll go into more depth in the future. We've also heard some fantastic ideas on our chat that we are looking into.

That is awesome to hear. The only reason I brought it up was because the disconnect tended to bug me. All these heroes have heard of the great dungeonlord and his evil blackens the landscape.... but you never leave your den underground. Never added up for me.

I'll definitely check out the demo when I get home from work.

As far as the game mechanics go, I had always thought sending monsters off on raids to the overworld might be kind of neat. The monsters are unusable for a given time and when a certain amount of time elapses, they return with spoils or in defeat, or some not at all. Maybe random events influence this, such as running into an ambush of king's soldiers, or they piss off a witch on the way to the target and all get turned into frogs. Hell, even terrible luck, like a dragon attacking the village at the same time. I just thought it would interesting, but I can understand that it may be too much of a deviation from the core inspiration of DK and Evil Genius.

I always figured you first established your presence underground (Game starts), the lords of the land became aware of you (First attacks) as you become more powerful they escalate realising the threat to their own lands and then finally you defeat the lord and your minions sack the lands above, with no resistance left to stand in your way this seems to be what happens on the campaign map.

Yes, but you don't see any evidence of that happening. You're just told how menacing and awesome you are and the lands of the world map blacken as you conquer them, but as far as you can actually see, you are underground the entire time. It's jarring.

There is going to be more aggressive play, but it will still be taking place underground. We explored overground ideas but it simply detracted from the core experience too much, however we may have some campaign-specific mechanics in this area.